The Art of Heart Maintenance
By Charles Hogg
Author bio: Charles Hogg is director of the Brahma Kumaris Raja Yoga Centres in
Charles Hogg reveals the secrets of a healthy heart.
It was my first visit to
Nearing the end of the week I emerged from the Hostel to find an older woman with the girls. In broken English she invited me to visit their home. We moved our way through the streets to a large vacant lot covered with humpies built with everything and anything imaginable: plastic bags, packing boxes, old tyres, hessian bags, discarded bits of wood. Many people gathered to greet me and I was offered food and drink with so much love and generosity (though perhaps partly financed by me!). Around these two little girls was a loving support structure of parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, cousins and more. In this desperate scene of abject poverty there was nothing . . . nothing but love, and that love was so rich it seemed to be everything that was needed. I began to think that these two little girls, who had become my friends, were lucky. It seemed to me that no matter what the circumstances, when the heart is maintained, life can be good.
However, if the heart is empty or broken or closed, nothing ever seems to satisfy, no matter what the circumstances. To compensate an empty heart, we crave wealth or power or fame or anything that will fill the void. In August of 1997, the world was shocked with the news of the death of Princess Diana. On one level it seemed she had everything except perhaps one missing ingredient . . . love. She craved true love. Her life was a testament to the search for true love. It seems the world-wide grief was the result of people identifying with her search for love to truly maintain the heart. We are all searching for it, but how often do we find it?
I think there are a few times in life when we emerge the feelings of true love. A friend told me he was on a subway in
Recently I spent time with someone dying of cancer. When I first met this woman, she had just been diagnosed and was full of fear and burden. Life experience had etched a deep sadness in her face. But during the last few months of her life there was a dramatic change. Her face now radiated joy and love. She had let go so many burdens carried for a lot of her life. She had let go trying to impress, let go the hurts from others, let go the pressure to be something she was not, let go the inferiority complex. But most of all she had let go of the fear of dying, which liberated her from the fear of living also. She discovered her authentic self and, like the baby, became so lovable to all around her.
A friend once said to me, “If you were told you only had a few months to live, how do you feel it would change you?” I thought about it quite a lot. I thought I would like to clear any regrets I had, tell others how much I appreciate them and how much they mean to me, let go of all the trivial tensions with others and focus on what is really important. I began to think . . . Isn’t this how I should be living anyway?
Between birth and death, what happens? We are desperate for the experience of true nourishing love, so we invest our heart in relationships with great trust and sincerity. But the Law of Life is change. Inevitably that which I love will leave, whether due to change, conflict or death. So I invest my heart again and the same thing happens. This process of loss leaves deep scars of fear and insecurity, so that as life progresses I put big barriers around my hear. The sign on my heart reads, “Stop! No admittance beyond this point!”
I want nothing more than the experience of love, but I’ve created so many barriers to stop it. Even if love is received, it is a polluted form of love that gives a temporary lift but does not truly maintain the heart. Sometimes the love is conditional, the sort of love that has a business contract with clauses and sub-clauses. Such love says, “I will love you but you must behave in the way I want. Otherwise my love stops.”
Or perhaps the love is selfish. This love only takes and never gives. The heart feels so empty. This love says, “Your very existence is to fill my heart”, and if the expectations are not fulfilled, there is resentment, anger and feelings of abandonment.
At other times the glossy magazines and certain TV programmers offer us a romantic image of love—beautiful people gazing adoringly into each other’s eyes. This superficial image of love makes most people feel inadequate. Research shows romantic feelings only remain for 6 to 8 months and then love takes on new dimensions. Yet for some, when romantic feelings change, there is a feeling that the love has finished. So the modern game of re-cycling relationships continues. We have also become victims of dependent love. Such love creates love/hate relationships: love because of the support, but hate and resentment because I’ve lost my freedom. I feel smothered and controlled, but I forget it is my dependence that created this feeling.
Those polluted forms of love have made heart disease one of the main health problems of the world today. There is love, but it is often not of the quality needed to cure the rampant heart disease so evident.
To create a healthy heart three main stages are required:
1. A full heart check up.
2. Heart surgery (if necessary).
3. A Heart Maintenance programme.
The Heart Checkup
I have a friend who prides himself on his physical fitness. He would regularly play squash and run, even though he lived an extremely busy life as a barrister and had a young family. One day after a run he developed severe pain in his chest. He immediately consulted his doctor, and tests showed that 90% of blood flow did not reach some parts of his heart. He was shocked to know this. My friend’s experience prompted me to think. How much love reaches my heart? We often don’t realize how little love-flow reaches our heart, and naturally the less that goes in the less goes out.
How do I test the love-flow to my heart? The real signs are contentment with myself and others. Pure love dissolves desires for others’ recognition and respect. Pure love will also replace arrogance with humility. Pure love will be so fulfilling that my natural response is to share love with others. I won’t even feel empty. So, how healthy is my heart?
Heart Surgery
Depending on my checkup, I may need heart surgery. The heart needs three types of love to become completely healthy, so sometimes surgery is required to begin the love-flow.
The First Surgery Procedure – Opening My Own Heart
We all now the ingredients of a good relationship: respect, trust, honesty, openness, care, compassion—the list goes on. Are these words that would describe my relationship with me? How do I treat myself? Do I lovingly care for my heart, or do I put myself down, beat myself, undervalue myself? This self-abusive behaviour seems to be at the core of my heart pain.
We all want to be self-loving. Why is it so hard sometimes? We are educated to try and love an image. Am I attractive, am I intelligent, am I successful? I am trying to love the very barriers and facades I have built around my heart. It has not only prevented others from coming close, it has prevented me coming close to me!
The first surgery procedure removes the old self-image of my body, my status, my beauty, my wealth, and replaces it with the awareness of my spiritual self. First I begin to accept myself as I am. Then, when I discover that my intrinsic original state is pure, I begin to heal deeply, and loving feelings for my true, authentic self emerge. This is the story of “The Sleeping Beauty”: the beautiful and lovable part of my heart was locked up in a big dark castle, overgrown with hurts, pains and sorrow. The prince gives the kiss of self-awareness that enables me to (awaken and) love my true self.
The Second Surgery Procedure – Opening My Heart to the Love of God
The heart became so fragile and sensitive because I felt I was not lovable. I could not accept love from anyone, especially God, because I did not feel worthy.
But now that I have discovered my pure authentic self, this part of me can accept the love of God. Sometimes I like to sit quietly and allow myself to be loved by God. I put all other thoughts aside. This love is such a tonic that it makes a weak heart strong, a broken heart whole, an empty heart full, and a closed heart open up. It is the true love that I have always looked for, because, by definition, true love is love that always exists. This love cannot leave me.
The Third Surgery Procedure – Giving and Taking Love with Others
When my relationship with my own heart is strong and the heart of God is close, I have the foundation to care for my heart in any situation. Not only to maintain my own heart, but interaction with others helps heal their hearts also.
In my heart maintenance tool kit I carry some special tools that will help maintain my own heart and the hearts of others. Before I begin any heart maintenance procedure, I need to decide which tools will be most effective in each situation. It is suggested, if possible, to have a few moments of silence to discriminate clearly the procedure and tools required.
The Detachment Tool: this tool is essential to any heart maintenance kit. To be truly loving, I must be detached. Does that sound contradictory? When I am dependent I am affected and influenced by those I am dependent on. Every word or facial expression can affect my mood. If, however, I use the tool of detached involvement, my love and support can be constant, regardless of the moods of others.
The Good Wishes Tool: this tool is incredibly versatile and can fix most hearts. It comes from the realization that the foundation of positive relationships is good feelings. This tool can fix cynicism and mistrust, and can help open hearts that have been closed. For the tool to be effective, I need to learn the positive qualities of the other person and make a commitment to maintaining my vision on those qualities regardless of their fluctuations.
The Forgiveness Tool: this tool is extremely effective to clear away the rubbish of the past. It can dissolve old rusty feelings and clear the air. As soon as the forgiveness tool is applied, it instantly relieves heart pain and often the patient remarks, “If only I had used this tool earlier!” This tool works best with broken hearts that just can’t let go feelings of anger and resentment.
The Respect Tool: this tool works best with heavy hearts: hearts that carry the weight of many mistakes and failures and when we just cannot see any beauty in our own heart. The powerful self-belief is that I am unlovable, and as a result there is no self-respect. Such hearts expect others not to love or like them. The respect tool rekindles self-value and begins to remove the burden.
The Meditation Tool: this is an essential tool in any Heart Maintenance Kit. When the users know how to apply it, they become the master of looking after their own heart. This tool shows us how to regularly check our own heart and see that the flow of true love in and out is regular. An experienced user of this tool can instantly diagnose if a blockage has developed somewhere, and begin to remove it.
My Heart Maintenance Programme
My ongoing heart maintenance programme needs a healthy diet and regular exercise. A healthy diet consists of a balanced consumption of positive and loving thoughts and feelings. I need to be careful not to consume the fatty thoughts of negative self-talk that clog my love-flow. Exercise for my heart consists of giving love to others. If I do this exercise daily it will help maintain my heart.
When I learn the Art of Heart Maintenance, I have discovered the secret at the core of a happy and fulfilling life.
Dying to be Thin
Jillian Sawers breaks down the myths surrounding diet and beauty and how to break free from the fear of food
In a recent study of high school girls 53% were unhappy with their bodies by age thirteen and by the age of eighteen 78% were dissatisfied. The
In our adolescence we are warned of the dangers of taking drugs; doctors’ surgeries are full of posters and leaflets giving detailed accounts of the signs, symptoms and dangers of drug addiction. And yet it seems that the diseases of compulsive eating, bulimia and anorexia are even more widespread, and starting at increasingly young ages, can haunt an individual through much of their life. There is no way of measuring the damage to the self-esteem, health, success and happiness of millions of people.
The Beauty Myth
It is no coincidence that the number of people affected by some kind of eating disorder is rising sharply and running in parallel to the increase in beauty pornography. You may not have heard that term, but may have become increasingly aware of its presence. Remember, not that long ago, when the covers of women’s magazines were decorated with the face of one or another pretty model? Suddenly it seems, the norm has become not just the upper body of the model, but very often the model is topless. Just yesterday I was flicking through a magazine in a waiting room, and wondered what product a young model was being used to promote. In all seven of the pictures there she was almost totally naked.
What was she promoting? In her milestone book, the Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf captured the essence of the most powerful illusion which has pervaded modern society—if you are not beautiful you cannot be successful or happy. The beauty myth traps woman in a cycle of self-hatred and self-imposed limitations brought on by the daily consumption of hundreds of images of impossibly beautiful, thin and seemingly happy successful young women. The myth tells us that we too can ‘have it all’ if only we were to invest enough time, energy, will-power and, of course, money into achieving it. Each and every beauty product within that magazine was associated with slim, attractive, naked female forms. For ‘she’ represents the dreams of beauty for millions of women, and the dreams of millions in revenue for the manufacturers of beauty products, diets, plastic surgery and exercise equipment.
There is little point in fighting the irresponsibility of advertisers and manufacturers, for they themselves know not what they do. Their evasions of the issue can be heard in their clichéd claim, “We are only selling what women really want”. But in our search for self-esteem, a real sense of identity and purpose in life, we need to acknowledge the powerful influence of the media in shaping our consciousness, desires and behaviour. Perhaps this is the first step in the healing process.
A journey through a substantial museum or art gallery will reveal a wide range of beauty norms, according to culture and time period. Within the 20th century alone, we have seen the popularity of the boy-like figure of the 20’s, the voluptuous Marilyn Monroe ideal of the 50’s, followed by the pre-pubescent ideal of Twiggy in the 60’s. The goal posts keep shifting. But it seems thinness is here to stay. And this is a goal which takes more than an application of make-up and new hair-do to achieve.
Public Enemy Number One—the Diet!
Enter stage left—the Diet! When someone embarks on a diet, it is not as simple, as restricting food intake, losing weight, maintaining weight. When we enter this mysterious world of dieting we enter into a dream, a promise, maintained by an elaborate set of rituals.
The dieter begins to invest their mental energy in a battle against themselves to attain a weight, which they consciously or subconsciously feel will bring them the confidence, style, love, success and acceptance they desire—a battle that most never win. Statistics reveal that 97% gain the weight lost from dieting, plus some more. Of course we would never conclude that the diet doesn’t work, only that the dieter is suffering from severe lack of self-control or will-power. Just try harder. Yet there are many reasons why diets will never work, and why, if we are serious about regaining healthy eating habits, we need to say a long overdue goodbye to calorie counting, raw carrots and scales.
As soon as someone decides to start restricting their food intake to lose weight, powerful psychological and physiological forces come into play. Naomi Wolf recounts a fascinating experiment at the
Before too long the group began to exhibit classic symptoms of food disorders: collecting recipes, hoarding food, emotional disturbance, binges, vomiting and self-reproach. Some were terrified to go outside the experiment environment, in case they were tempted by foods they had agreed not to eat. Interestingly, all the volunteers were men, and they were responding in a perfectly predictable, understandable manner.
The Rebel Within
Firstly the body is magnificently equipped to avoid starvation, and at the first signs of impending famine, will slow down the metabolism in order to store fat longer. After some time, the appetite will increase dramatically in order to prompt the food consumption needed to sustain life. Thus the dieter has to work harder and harder against the body’s natural mechanisms in order to lose and maintain weight lost.
On a psychological level also, I can only ignore my appetite, in order to attain the acceptable ideal, for a restricted period of time. Eventually a wonderful psychological magic takes place. The rebel within me, which tires of conforming, which wants to be accepted for who I really am, not an imposed ideal, begins to wreak havoc with my best laid plans for slimming down. Like a child which needs a deeper motive to be good, rather than just fear or reward from the parents to avoid the bad, my deeper inner self rebels against the shallowness of my motivation. It will no longer put up with starvation to look good for the world. It stands its ground, and you head for the fridge.
Normally, heading back to food doesn’t mean adjusting back to normal eating habits; more often it’s a binge, followed by another retribution diet, binge, diet, binge. When you tell someone they can’t have something which is in front of them it produces an unnaturally strong desire for that thing. This is why a dieting mentality produces food obsessions, and eventually when the will is overcome, bingeing. Every time a diet is resumed, it becomes harder to lose weight, because the metabolism becomes less and less efficient.
Although the futility of dieting may be obvious, it’s not so easy to renounce its powerful lure. For years it has held within it the promise of a bright future, and an avoidance of present pains. And although diets have kept us in a pattern of being in tight control and then completely out of control, we fear that if we were to give up trying to control ourselves, then we would be out of control forever, and who knows how fat we might become as a result.
Letting go of the diet
It is important to keep in mind that eventually once your mind and body are convinced that deprivation doesn’t lie around the next corner, they will begin to relax and find their own natural rhythm. So the first step is to give yourself full permission to eat and enjoy whatever food you desire. If the very thought strikes fear into your heart, then this is definitely the advice for you. The longer we fear food, the longer it will control us. We have to face that fear by keeping a wide range of foods available to us all the time, more than we could eat in one or even two sittings. This helps convince our mind that the food isn’t going to run out, so you don’t need to eat everything while you still can. If this still sounds illogical, think of the last time you binged on chocolate or ice cream. Did you eat half a bar, fold the wrapper over neatly and return it to the cupboard for a later date? More than likely you finished the whole thing, plus anything else sweet you could find. Now imagine you are faced with a cupboard so full that you could never finish it, at some point you would have to say ‘enough!’ And you could, for you know that it will still be there later. You may at first find yourself eating huge amounts of food, but eventually you will begin to say enough, much more frequently and sooner. If you find your bingeing doesn’t start to diminish after quite a long period, it may be that you are treating this new approach as yet another diet, and if it doesn’t work, you will go back on a ‘real diet’. If this is the case, your subconscious won’t believe that famine is not around the corner, and it will still want to feast just in case.
It is thoroughly recommended that you throw or at least pack away your scales, so that you don’t panic and rush back to the comfort of a diet, or equally important, if you do begin to lose weight, it is fatal to base your happiness on that. You need to break free from having your happiness dictated by those little numbers on the machine.
It is also important that you start doing all those things you dream of doing when you reach your perfect dress size. Whether swimming, wearing nice clothes, applying for a new job, or creating new relationships, if you postpone living till you are slim then you will never be slim and you will never start living.
Avoid reading women’s magazines for a while. They only trigger comparisons, low-esteem and yet another diet.
Eating to overcome over-eating.
Obviously you can’t expect to eat everything in sight and lose weight. But the first scary step in the process of healing is to start accepting your body as it is now, understanding the reasons behind your inability to lose weight, and to ease up on yourself. To relax at last.
Eventually we have to heal negative eating patterns by replacing them with good ones. This involves listening carefully internally to distinguish whether the urge to eat is a healthy physical hunger or a spiritual, emotional or mental hunger. It can take some practice to clearly make the distinction, because for those whom hunger is often the last reason for eating, the signal for genuine hunger can be very subtle. Once you have recognised that your body needs food, you need to ask your intuition what would satisfy the hunger. Lists of special foods and calorie requirements have often put us out of touch with our body’s own incredible wisdom for knowing what it actually needs. If we don’t satisfy that need, we may eat much more than we require in order to fulfil it. The act of respecting hunger, rather than denying or suppressing it, and then eating what is required, is a great act of self-love. The pleasure of eating from a real appetite and eating what the body really requires, contains a care and sweetness which eventually makes the mechanical, addictive eating experience, where one doesn’t even taste the food whilst eating, seem an empty experience in comparison.
Rules for eating
- Forget the rules. At least the rules that had you counting every morsel, and feeling guilty for breaking them.
- Check to see whether you are really hungry.
- If hungry ask yourself what you really feel like eating.
- If you realise you are not hungry, but you still want to eat, acknowledge you are comfort eating, and ask yourself what you would really like to eat.
- Make an occasion out of the meal, enjoy each mouthful.
- If you do comfort eat, don’t feel guilty afterwards.
- Try and discover what triggered the need to comfort eat and see if you can find a more appropriate way of dealing with it in the future.
Facing the feelings
There are numerous triggers which can send a compulsive eater to the fridge. Loneliness, boredom, excitement, celebrations, nervousness, rejection, and so on. We can misuse eating to block out these unpleasant feeling in two ways. First, while eating, our occupied mind is given a break from feeling the feelings. And second, after the binge, I can then occupy my mind with bad feelings towards my self, and the weight I am gaining. The original fear or problem which was concerning me has now been transferred to my eating and weight problem. And I feel if only I could have victory over my weight, everything in my life would be perfect. People are often disappointed upon losing weight, to find that their lives haven’t improved greatly. As part of the healing of negative eating patterns, it is vital that we become more sensitive and sympathetic to the state of our emotions. Keeping a diary of your emotions and eating patterns can be useful for this, as can observing your feelings at different times with different people. For instance visits back to old family homes can trigger old feelings and eating patterns because of unresolved anxiety or memories around our childhood or parents. Breathing deeply, consciously relaxing and eating slowly can help us face rather than run from feelings.
Satisfying Spiritual Hunger
Ultimately overcoming overeating is a process for which we need to draw deeply on our inner stock of patience and self-love. Instead of putting a dummy, in the form of food, in our mouths, we must keep asking ourselves, what is the real need, what do I really want? The desire to overeat is simply our inner child crying out for some quality attention. That quality attention can involve asking our inner self questions such as, “How am I feeling? What do I want? Will food give me what I want? Is this emotional or physical hunger? What does the soul need? What do I the soul need to experience or express?”
The search to satisfy this real inner hunger is a spiritual one and the hidden blessing of any addiction is that it ultimately forces us to rediscover our inner self, our true identity and our true inner beauty. This is especially pertinent to eating disorders because of their obsessiveness with body image and food sensation.
The practice of meditation is extremely vital in learning to love and understand the self and ultimately transform negative conditioning. One of the discoveries that one makes in meditation is the difference between the spiritual ‘I’, the inner being, and the body which I inhabit, rather like a costume. Instead of needing external beauty to make me feel valuable, I experience my real inner beauty and strength, and develop a stronger sense of self worth. I find myself maintaining my body out of a sense of love and responsibility for myself, rather than using the body to seek attention and satisfaction. Meditation can also help us discover a deeper sense of our purpose in life, freeing us from more mundane concerns and worries.
Writing affirmations based on the concept of the spiritual self, loving and caring for the physical body, can work wonders, reprogramming old subconscious thought patterns with minimal effort. You can write them, speak them or do both simultaneously. I would suggest twenty-five in the morning and twenty-five in the evening—experiment for yourself. The following affirmations are some of my favourites.
- I have a healthy vibrant body which I treat respectfully.
- I treat my precious body with love and care.
- I am a content soul who treats my body with gentleness and respect.
- I am a goddess residing in my sacred temple with dignity and peace.
Long Term Success
The journey back to physical, emotional, mental and spiritual well-being is a lifelong one, and a great test of patience for those of us addicted to the crash-diet experience. As a survival kit, you may like to keep the following reminders handy.
What can help?
- Understanding that we aren’t abnormal or crazy, only compulsive.
- Finding new ways to express ourselves.
- Giving up sugar—yes, sugar is an addictive substance and giving it up can often reduce bingeing by 90%!
- Learning more about the interaction between food, the body and emotions.
- Learning new ways to nurture ourselves that don’t involve eating.
- Moderate exercise.
- Wearing comfortable clothes which you feel good in.
- Developing a support system for yourself.
- Keeping a daily diary.
- Doing affirmations daily and meditating regularly.
What doesn’t help?
- Going to doctors, therapists and counsellors who aren’t specialised in the area of eating disorders.
- Dieting, vomiting, diet pills, drinks, laxatives.
- Worrying constantly about your weight or food.
- Weighing yourself.
- Reading the monthly glossies.
- And giving yourself a hard time about anything!
Jillian Sawers is a facilitator, coach, trainer and writer assisting organisations in Europe and
Food for Thought
Barbara Ramsay reflects on what’s good in food and best in diet.
‘Always read the fine print’ used to refer to mortgages, contracts and important business deals. Now it’s cereal boxes, soup cans and bottles of juice. We stand in supermarkets peering at labels, trying to decipher strange codes with numbers attached, and search for things are ‘poly’ or ‘mono’ or ‘un’. When Linus refused to eat his peanut butter sandwich and Lucy demanded to know why, he looked at her with horror and said, “Look at the label on the jar. This thing is full of ingredients!”
The food pundits have a lot to answer for. They say we shouldn’t eat dairy foods. They cause mucous. Vegies are okay but watch out for the dreaded eggplant. It has the same cellular structure as a cancer cell. A tomato? Well, that’s part of the deadly nightshade family. Follow ‘Pritikin’ and you’ll eat lots of grain before noon. Be macrobiotic and you’ll eat almost nothing else all day. ‘Live mostly on fruit but always cook it.’ they say. Except, of course, for the ones who say, ‘live mostly on fruit, but never, under any circumstances, cook it.’
And it’s not only eating that’s fraught with danger. Drinking is almost as complicated. Hot chocolate is out, after all, it’s made with milk. Coffee? You might as well say ‘arsenic’. Tea is almost worse than coffee because it not only has caffeine, it also has tannic acid. Soft drinks don’t have tannic acid, but they do have the caffeine. They also have sugar, except for the diet type and they’re all mini chemical factories just looking for a stomach to pollute. Juice should be freshly squeezed or it has no nutritional value at all and for heaven’s sake don’t drink it with anything else. Of course, there’s always water, but the stuff from the tap is full of dreadful things and the stuff that bubbles up from springs—well, who knows what’s in the ground these days. There’s always mineral water, but then the minerals aren’t really all that good for you. Listen to it all and you’ll end up living on distilled water and wind-fall apples and I’m not too sure about the apples.
Then there’s the ‘vegetarian’ question, a subject that has caused many a long discussion with friends. For me, when my daughter was small and we’d just been singing ‘Mary had a little lamb’ and then there were chops for dinner, it gripped my mind and wouldn’t let go. But... if I say I don’t eat anything that thinks, or is conscious, huge debates spring up filled with facts about carrots than scream when you cut them, and questions like ‘how can you prove a fish thinks?’ To save the trouble, I just say I don’t eat anything that has a face. No matter what our food choices or opinions of all the arguments, with all the facts and figures, the speculations and investigations, something very important is usually left out.
Food feeds more than just the stomach and it nourishes more than just the body. Food comforts the heart as well. After all, how many mothers offer a cookie as well as a hug, when a child falls down? When food is given with loving hands, it has the power to soothe a crying child. Even when we’re grown, its power to comfort is still there. In many cultures, when someone is bereaved, it’s traditional for neighbours and friends to bring food to the house. Far more than simply saving the mourning from having to cook, it means ‘I care ... I’m here ... there is life after this’.
Celebrations too, often have food at their heart. We invite people to share a meal as a sign of friendship, and we celebrate birthdays with a cake. And what is nicer, warmer or friendlier than to bake something sweet for people you care about?
Life being what it is, there are lots of special treats for the palate, the tummy and the heart that will never disappear—whether or not they’re good for us—and the most important of these are the things that are made by hand, by someone you know.
Sure, cakes and biscuits from the supermarket, or frozen dinners and tins of things save people lots of time. There’s no reading of recipes or spending extra time in the kitchen or washing up afterwards. But you can’t make them carefully, with love, and they will never fill the kitchen with the good smells of culinary care and cosiness. You can’t serve them still warm from the oven and you can’t bake them with your children.
But there is even more to home cooked food than the way it tastes and they way it smells. More, even, than the act of sharing. Though it’s true that ‘We are what we eat’, it’s even ore true that ‘We are what we think’, for the human mind is a powerful thing. Few people these days would doubt that our minds send out vibrations constantly and that these vibrations effect the world we life in. It’s something that people always seem to have sensed on an instinctive level.
Once when I was small, I remember overhearing my mother talk about a quarrel and the atmosphere it left. “You could cut the air with a knife”, she said. To my child’s mind this was incredibly vivid. I could almost see that air ... thick and kind of gluey. It would be hard to walk against such air, I thought, and impossible to run or skip. For a long time whenever there was quarrel, I looked hard, trying to actually see the air in the room, but I didn’t have to get much older before I understood what she meant.
In the days of the happy hippies and the flower children, people said, ‘Good vibes, man’, or ‘heavy’. It made total sense. An atmosphere filled with antagonism or jealousy or anger is heavy and it does create a feeling you can almost cut with a knife. We all know these things. There are endless numbers of books written on how to use the right thoughts to create your own life, to change it into what you want it to be. Everyone agrees that thoughts are powerful. It is accepted that our moods can affect the atmosphere. And if the way we think affects the vibrations, it also affects the food we cook. Every day we deal with vibrations that we can’t see and yet completely accept. Many of these vibrations travel incredible distances and are picked up so clearly and so strongly that they arrive as pictures and sound, clear enough for anyone to see. The only reason we don’t look at television as a little cosmic, the only reason we don’t view it with scepticism, is because we’re used to it.
With the click of a switch, light happens, and we never waste any time considering how impossible that seems. Indeed, if it depended on our belief, we’d probably still be living in the dark. Some miracles we’re used to and some are simply still new to us.
When we are cooking, our minds are working, minds do that all the time, whether we want them to or not. That’s what our minds do. When we are stirring and rolling and baking, we’re thinking, and thinking creates vibrations, whether we want it to or not, because that’s what thoughts do. If we are thinking positive thoughts, then our vibrations are happy, peaceful ones and these affect the food, so they will affect the people who eat the food.
Except in places where survival is so hard that food simply holds the body and the soul together, the sharing of it has always been part of deeply significant moments ... milestones in life: the wedding breakfast, the christening feast, the funeral feast, the shared feast of thanksgiving that commemorates an older sharing of food between two cultures. Even the words ‘breaking break’ signify friendship and peace. Deeply spiritual moments use food as their coin of passage, whether in the West, where Christ and his disciples shared the Last Supper, or in the East, where worshippers are given food that has been offered in temples, or cooked in remembrance of God.
Thoughts are powerful and the vibrations created by what we think affect Life. If our thoughts are filled with negativity, if we cook when we are angry or upset, we run the risk, like an old wives’ tale, of metaphorically ‘curdling the sauce’. Cook with care, cook with love and know that this is one miracle you have control over ... one miracle you can perform.
It’s in our power to give this miracle, like a gift, to the people who eat what we cook. It’s in our power to give them food that holds peace and love and warmth and even a little bit of magic. We must never forget that in the best of recipes, love is the secret ingredient.
Barbara Ramsay is a Freelance Writer based in Melbourne, Australia
